Lahat ng Kabanata ng Caged By The Cruel Alpha : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

"We don't respond," Garth said. "Responding legitimises the threat. Vorik wants an answer — any answer — because an answer tells him we're rattled." The council room was full again, the senior warriors arranged around the map table in the tense, contained way of people who had strong opinions and were waiting to see whose would land. Three lamps burned against the grey morning. Wren stood at the far end of the table and watched the room and said nothing, because she was still calculating what she had standing to say and to whom. Cain had looked at her when she walked in and then looked at Garth, and Garth had looked at Wren with the barely-concealed assessment of a man deciding whether to object. He had not yet objected. Wren was not yet certain he wouldn't. "Not responding tells him we're frightened," said a younger warrior on Garth's left — Brynn, she'd learned, sharp-faced and quick, the kind of woman who moved like she expected conflict to arrive from any direction. "Silence rea

"Let me see it." Wren had been sitting at the workshop table for an hour with the lamp angled toward her left wrist, reading Elara's journals for any reference to a counter-working, a curse that turned to observe the healer who touched it, anything that matched what she'd felt in the session yesterday. She'd found three partial references and two complete dead ends and had been so focused on the pages that she hadn't heard the workshop door. She looked up. Cain stood in the doorway. He had the look of a man who had slept less than he needed and was managing the result with the same controlled competence he managed everything else. His gaze was on her left wrist, which was resting on the table and which he apparently had no difficulty seeing from the doorway in dim lamplight. "It's not visible," she said. "I know." He came inside. "I could feel it. Through the bond." She looked at him. "You felt it." "When you pulled back from the session. There was —" He paused, something moving

"You look terrible," Sera said. Wren sat down in the chair. "Thank you." "That's not what I — " Sera stopped. "You look like someone who has had news they didn't know how to put down." She watched Wren's face with the direct, clear attention that had started feeling, over the past weeks, like one of the most reliable things Wren had encountered since childhood. "Was it the second informant?" "Thorne told you." "Thorne told Cain. Cain came in here afterward and was the specific kind of quiet that means he's been hit somewhere real." Sera paused. "He didn't tell me who it was. But I could tell it was someone he knew well." "Aldren," Wren said, and watched Sera's face do the same complicated thing Thorne's face had done. "Aldren," Sera repeated, very quietly. She looked at the window. She was quiet for a long moment. "How long has he been with the pack?" Wren asked, though she knew the answer. "Nine years," Sera said. "He came the same year Elara died. He'd known her — from before

"I want to speak with him first." Cain stood in the doorway of the holding room's antechamber — a bare stone room used mostly for storage that had been cleared when the holding room itself reached capacity with Dren — and looked at Wren with the expression she'd learned to read as the one he wore when he was deciding whether to object on principle or simply accept that she usually had a reason. "Why?" he asked. "Because you've already decided what you feel about this," she said. "Which is right and appropriate. But it means you'll be looking for confirmation rather than information. I don't know him. I have no investment in the outcome." She paused. "I might hear something you'd miss." He held her gaze for a moment. "You heard what Thorne found. The supply roster access. The chain of connection to Blood Moon-adjacent territory." "I heard the evidence," she said. "I haven't heard him." Another moment. Then he stepped aside. She went in. Aldren was perhaps sixty, a compact and qu

Move," Wren said. She was already through the door, already on the stairs, already moving with the controlled speed of someone who had spent two weeks learning the fastest route through this pack house because she was someone who always learned the fastest routes. Behind her she could hear Cain — no faster than her on the stairs, which told her that this specific fear expressed itself in him as intense stillness rather than urgency. She could feel it anyway, the bond or whatever it was that lived in that threshold between them, transmitting something cold and immediate. The door to Sera's room was open. The pack healer, a quiet woman named Asha, was inside, and two of Sera's regular attendants, and the lamp was high. Sera was in the bed, which was where she'd been — she hadn't fallen, the warrior's word had been imprecise. She was in the bed but her breathing had changed, and when Wren crossed the threshold she felt it immediately: something had shifted. Not emergency. Not the fina